Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

ALTER aims to demonstrate that there are real and lasting benefits for wide scale poverty alleviation, particularly for the rural poor, by tackling soil degradation at a range of spatial scales, from field to landscape, and using opportunities within agricultural as well as severely degraded land. Throughout the world, soil degradation impacts on the health, wealth and well-being of rural people in many different ways. Soils have a key supporting role in maintaining agricultural yields, water availability, water quality, resources for grazing animals and other ecosystem services. Some are perhaps less obvious but still valued such as maintaining habitats to support honey-bees and local wildlife. In Africa, soil degradation is recognised as a major constraint to alleviating poverty in rural communities. We have chosen to work in Ethiopia and Uganda where there are contrasting issues of soil degradation in mineral and organic soils are a result of agricultural land use but similar reliance in rural communities' on a range of benefits from soils. Solutions to soil degradation are not simple and require a much better understanding of how people benefit from soils, what they stand to gain if they can improve the condition of the soils that they manage whether for crops, livestock, timber production or as semi-natural areas, what they would need to do to accomplish this and what barriers may prevent this. In parallel we need to gain better insight into the likely success of different management options to improve soils. Ultimately these options will require some form of investment whether that be via money, time, resources or other mechanisms. We will investigate the relative pros and cons of these mechanisms from the perspective of local people, organisations involved with markets for Payments for Ecosystem Services and national objectives in alleviating poverty. A broader view of carbon benefits and trading is an opportunity to invest in lasting improvements in degraded ecosystems and the livelihoods of the poor that depend on these. All of this research and evidence building needs to be placed into the context of climate change. We need to establish that whatever might be suitable, acceptable and viable for tackling soil degradation now will have long-term benefits to local people and that these benefits will not be negated by the on-going changes to local climate. The ALTER project is an international consortium between The James Hutton Institute (UK), University of Aberdeen (UK), Hawassa University (Ethiopia), The Ethiopian Government's Southern Agricultural Research Institute (SARI, Ethiopia), Carbon Foundation for East Africa (CAFEA, Uganda) and the International Water Management Institute (Nile Basin & Eastern Africa Office, Ethiopia). This team brings together natural scientists, social scientists and economists to work together with rural communities and other local decision-makers and facilitators to improve our capacity to predict how human-environment linked systems respond to incentives and other drivers change. This predictive capacity is needed to be able to explore whether different options for change could result in substantive poverty alleviation.

The volume of groundwater in Africa is more than 100 times the annual renewable freshwater resource and 20 times the amount of freshwater stored in lakes, but its productive use in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains low. Global abstraction of groundwater increased tenfold between 1950 and 2000 and contributed significantly to growth in irrigation particularly in Asia. The global area equipped for irrigation has been estimated as 301 Mha of which 38% depends on groundwater, but for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) only 5.7% of the irrigated area is supported by groundwater. Just as in Asia, rapid expansion of groundwater irrigation may be about to occur in SSA. Although evidence from Asia suggests that groundwater irrigation promotes greater inter-personal, inter-gender, inter-class and spatial equity than is found under large scale canal irrigation, there is a significant risk that rapid development of groundwater resources in SSA may lead to inequitable resource use. There is a need for research to deliver the evidence and appropriate tools to support sustainable resource management and to assure access to groundwater resources by poor people. This research will address the following questions: 1: How and at what rate is groundwater being recharged? Deliverable: improved understanding of recharge processes at local and catchment scale; including consideration of influence of land use and water harvesting. 2: Can a tool be developed to help decision makers manage the resource? Deliverable: tools developed and tested at local (community) and catchment scales to assist decision makers in managing groundwater resources. 3: What are the implications of changes in land use? Deliverable: improved understanding of evidence base for influence of land use, water harvesting and green water flows on groundwater recharge. 4: What are the implications of climate change? Deliverable: tools for downscaling climate data and constructing scenarios developed and likely influence on recharge processes investigated. 5: How can policy and practice assure livelihood benefits for poor people? Deliverable: improved understanding of issues affecting access to and control of groundwater for productive use in irrigated agriculture. 6: What governance approaches are most likely to deliver equitable and sustainable use of groundwater? Deliverable: participatory evaluation of institutional change required at local community level and at national/catchment level to achieve equitable and sustainable use of groundwater in irrigated agriculture. Preliminary research will be delivered over a 1 year period by a multi-disciplinary research team from Newcastle University and the International Water Management Institute together with local partners in Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa. This will deliver a pilot study and build the research consortium. The pilot study in Ethiopia will address both technical and social/governance aspects of groundwater resource assessment and management from the regional to the local scale. Lake Tana basin has been selected as a suitable site. In parallel, additional exploratory research will be conducted in Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa. Key stakeholders will be invited to participate in consultations at in-country workshops aimed at understanding current state of knowledge around groundwater resources. Critical knowledge gaps likely to influence design of follow-up research will be identified and in-country collaborators will be commissioned to carry out short term studies. At the end of the 1-year catalyst grant project collaborating scientists representing partners from SSA together with UNEW and IWMI will meet for 3-day workshop in Addis Ababa in order to review lessons learned and agree design of the follow-on 4-year research project.

The key strategy and framework around GRAN implementation is to strengthen the research-operation-policy axis related to groundwater and its integration into broader water resources management and development policies. This will be achieved through these key activities: 1. An initial stakeholder mapping and consultation exercise, scoping out the seven potential network themes and further engaging and committing key network partners to a joint vision of sustainable groundwater development and management in Africa through enhanced collaboration, capacity development and solution implementation 2. Synthesis, translation and dissemination of research outputs (in collaboration with researchers and programme knowledge brokers) to create relevant, accessible (online) and useable material to a range of non-academic stakeholders. This step will focus on research outputs, which have already demonstrated solutions (technical, legal, policy, institutional/engagement based) with significant outscaling potential. Research results will also feed into important capacity development networks in Africa (e.g. AGW-Net) to stimulate a domino effect of dissemination of knowledge. 3. Two continental-scale workshops, organised to coincide with existing events led by AMCOW and SADC-GMI, which will bring together academic and non-academic beneficiaries to exchange experiences around each network theme; themes may then go on to form the basis of several sub-networks 4. Support to smaller (national-scale) events and online interactions (such as the RWSN webinar series) responding to expressed demand for research-into-use collaboration around groundwater 5. Ongoing engagement with network partners through identified sub-network leads or champions to anchor sub-networks beyond the GRAN, with support from GRIPP. The proposed network, GRAN, will build on and expand existing groundwater-related structures through two major international events, complemented by smaller events, virtual meeting activities and curation and dissemination of material through online platforms such as GRIPP and the Africa Groundwater Atlas. The larger events, one of which will be held within the first six months of the network, will evolve around already planned events, one with focus on policy development and one with focus on Research-into-Use, while both will target policy makers, researchers and practitioners. The first will be led by AMCOW (in Western Africa), and the second by SADC-GMI (in Southern Africa). The key objective of the meetings is to exchange knowledge on groundwater management and development potentials and risks and how to address these by incorporating lessons from recent significant research and piloting/implementation of technical, institutional or policy solutions, with implications for capacity development. The meetings will make updated inventory of key institutions in the regions engaged in groundwater research, management and policy development. The events will be thematically structured around key challenges that may ultimately underpin a series of sub-networks.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.